Video Games Made Me a Better Entrepreneur

I played a lot of video games growing up. I rented countless titles with Gamefly and played through games of all different genres. Surprisingly, there’s a valuable skill that I picked up from all those hours on the couch.

Every game had new controls and a new world. Every world had unique limitations and boundaries. Mastering the game required finding the limitations and boundaries of the game. This meant letting my character die on purpose to find out how he could die, taking damage from enemies to calculate how many times I could get hit, testing the intelligence of the AI, etc.

After losing lives and failing in order to understand the scope of the world I was operating in, I was prepared to win. I knew what was possible, and I knew how to play to perfection.

That process, of discovering the boundaries, was repeatable on every game I played. This same idea can be applied to business.

You have to experiment and be willing to fail in order to find the best path forward. Without testing your boundaries, you’re operating under assumed constraints.